#haha lobcorp mention

[vulpixisananimal]

the king, aka Aleph Waw He Teth Zayin

Alef(ph) Luan Nolastname you are a child who ain't even close to Aleph class

[strangefellows]

excuse me for a moment while i go on a little rant about my limbus theory under a cut (and untagged because fandom scares me) bc i went on this rant earlier to a friend i want to post it

So one of the biggest complaints I've seen people have with the Dante-is-Ayin theory is that it's "bad writing to repeat the twist from the first game" and objectively, yes, but that's not what they're doing at ALL and I've said it before and I'll say it until I'm blue in the face. It's actually giving Ayin a chance to be a character with agency, and give him closure/a real ending.

Like. Okay. In Lobcorp. he has NO actual dialogue beyond player choices sometimes - which we know doesn't count thanks to games like Persona who have similar arguments about their PCs - and we never see his face until the very last Day of the game....and it's not even really 'him' it's basically his shadow talking to him! And even the flashbacks are almost certainly narrated by that shadow rather than the X/A we're playing as. Not to mention the amnesia for the first half of the game; and even after he remembers they call him A rather than X -- and we don't even get his full name until the very last lines of the game.

And let's be real here, I think it's very telling of his lack of agency that the last lines are "Your name is Ayin. Now close your eyes and fade away."

As he disappears into the Light he just spent the entire game generating.

Left on its own, and especially with the entirety of Ruina giving Angela closure and a place to overcome her trauma and issues, it's grievously unfair.

When half the plot of the game is Ayin helping save and guide the people in hell with him into closure and moving forward-- what does he get? Someone else telling him to fade away his role is over bye.

He doesn't get to get that closure and forgiveness and chance to move on that Angela does! He spends the whole game acting on someone else's last wish, someone else's dream, trying to save the people he'd condemned to hell and make up for his actions, and then he doesn't get to be saved with them.

He has no voice, no face, barely a name. No agency -- everything he does in Lobcorp is because of Carmen's wishes. Everything we hear about him is from the perspective of other people, and incredibly biased; even the flashbacks aren't from the POV of the X/A we're playing as but the 'shadow' (mirror self? haha looks at yi sang) from Day 50.

And more than that -- we don't know Ayin outside of Carmen. We don't know anything about his life before he met her. We don't know who he is, what he likes, what he wanted, what he studied, what he did before her. Everything Ayin has been in this series so far is from the lens of someone else. (So any theory tying him to Demian - even if Demian isn't related to Enoch, which is still possible - can still apply; because we don't know him outside Carmen, there could very well be a tie from before then.)

So Dante's faceless, voiceless nature, how they're just kind of forced into the situation they're in and how they're slowly gaining their own agency and deciding on their own will what kind of person they are and what they want to do, from their own perspective, as they seek to regain their voice and face and Self...

It's perfect.

It's not "bad writing" at all. It's like that quote from George Lucas: “Again, it’s like poetry, so that they rhyme. Every stanza kind of rhymes with the last one.” It's poetry.

A mirror of the first game, not a rehash of the same twist, a continuation of the story of the one character who never got his ending, who was never allowed to be a character, a person, who was never given his own choices on his own will, who was never given the opportunity for closure and moving on everyone else got. It's Ayin's chance for an ending, a real ending, one he's allowed to make with his own hands for himself. Face the sins and all that.

[Sits back with my 90+ page evidence document and sighs.]

[mulberriesandtea]

It depends on your requirements to be 'haunting the narrative' but 9 times out of 10 it's probably Carmen.

(Spoilers for like. the entirety of PM's universe and Danganronpa's whole series)

Carmen and Junko are both incredibly important to their respective series; Both have caused awful cataclysmic events that have changed the very core of their worlds, largely in part thanks to the systems in place. However, Junko needs people to carry on her legacy for her- the moment people forget about her, she dies with them. Carmen, on the other side, has practically been made into a god- one that does not need the memory of the world to show up, she just needs someone to be distraught enough.

Junko Enoshima died at the end of DR1, however she was still alive in Danganronpa: Despair Side. She was still alive in the novels. She's alive in a good chunk of the media. I'm not counting the 50 other games that DRV3 gives us; they're fictional, but they do give Junko a few points for her pure staying power; how deeply she's made herself an icon of despair and suffering. I don't know all of Danganronpa's media, but here is the ones I remember:

Danganronpa 1: Alive- Mastermind of killing game and the Tragedy, dies at very end of game for fun. Junko is the one who sets the games into motion.

Danganronpa 2: Dead- Shows up as an AI made to corrupt the thing trying to save her old subordinates from their old deranged ways.

Danganronpa UGS: Dead- She causes the rise of Monaca, as well as being the reason the world is the way it is. Also the AI from DR2 is split into 2 'kumas here.

Danganronpa V3: Dead?- V3 is odd to talk about due to its ending and how it makes it so Junko was fictional(I do personally think the ending is fine, it's full of questions that I find quite fascinating. Could it have been handled better? Absolutely, I think there's other things that handle those questions of the 'end of media' and 'pointing out the obvious but unconsidered' much better.)- though divulging in the purely fictional she's been used as a villian around 53 times.

Danganronpa Despair Side: Alive- Yeah.

I know there's at least one other where she's alive and is the amnesiac main character, but I can't remember its name.

Carmen technically died before the events of LC- depends on whether or not you consider her as 'alive' when she's a brain in a well, though everyone in character considers her dead after that point, so I will as well. She is dead in all media, and yet she has appeared without fail in the webcomics, webnovels and videogames to chat with the main protagonists. No one knows her name outside of those who knew what happened to her, and all of those people had been ousted far out into the Outskirts. I haven't read Distortion Detective, so I'm not including it outside of 'haha yeah. she really does cause that distortion huh.'

Lobotomy Corporation: The mother of all abnormalities, the reason Ayin had built the corporation, who Angela is a copy of, etc, etc. Carmen is the one who sets the games into motion.

Wonderlab: The characters work at a place inadvertently created by Carmen, and Party Everlasting is caused by her directly.

Library of Ruina: Distortions, also just about everything from LobCorp, did I mention Distortions?

Leviathan: Has a conversation with Vergillius to try and make him distort, ultimately fails.

Limbus Company: Kromer's phase 2 song is incredibly about her, not to mention the theory that she narrates the stories for the identities and likely is going to come and fuck even more shit up like she usually does- she's already causing an entire event.

The main reason I say 'it depends' is because haunting the narrative either implies literal haunting like Carmen or their legacy being so ingrained that even after being completely gone(no ghost or spirit) they are still causing new events to happen, like Junko. However, Carmen's been dead in all media so she gets added points from me.